Cybersecurity specialists have been talking about the “dissolving perimeter” for years; systems have been slowly moving outside of the tight confines of a corporate data centre to the cloud and employees working from home.
In just a few months that dissolving perimeter turned into wholesale demolition.
In the global response to COVID-19, successful companies share a few characteristics:
- Clarity of message – Communication has to be clear and focused. Messages open to interpretation often lead to confusion and discord.
- One for all – Far-reaching cultural transformation can happen virtually over-night when people understand why something is important, how it impacts them, and that changing behavior will bring positive outcomes.
- Collaboration – Most people want to do the right thing. Tens of millions of people have maintained social distancing, left home only when necessary, and broadly accepted a “new reality.” Essential workers, from doctors to retail staff, have risked their own health to help their neighbors and communities. Many governments work together and follow best practices to save lives and stave off a return to wide-scale restrictions.
When we look at the hard-learned lessons of the past several months, it seems inevitable there are more bumps in the road to come, but we try to reduce the impact, and put ourselves in the best position moving forward.
Business has traditionally been cautious and somewhat reluctant to embrace working from home on a large scale because of productivity and security concerns.
But as the world changed rapidly in the spring of 2020 we’ve seen a quantum leap in the support for working from home and flexible hours.
After the Herculean effort to provide remote working for as many employees as possible, the consensus from Fortune 500 companies predictions is that working from home works, and works well!
A significant number of CEOs now believe that more than a quarter of the workforce will be home-based permanently, and many businesses are accelerating the technical transformation required to support the new paradigm.
Business leaders are now laser-focused on educating remote teams about data identification, how to securely handle sensitive information, and reducing the potential for data loss.
Employers are working to ensure that employees have what they need to be part of the cybersecurity solution.
How Titus helps businesses navigate the COVID-19 landscape
Titus solutions work well with all the commonly used productivity tools, whether employees are in the office or at home.
Clarity of Message, One for All, and Collaboration align well with Titus’ methodology mantra of Educate, Empower, and Enforce – whether it is creating a schema for metadata that is intuitive to use and fits the business drivers, helping with communication plans, or clear and timely messaging to support sound data governance.
Like governmental Track-and-Trace programs that are rolling out globally to help rapidly identify new clusters of COVID-19 flare-ups, data security solutions today rely on multiple parties to use a common framework for collaboration with the public, governments, and the international community at large to be successful.
The new reality has led to a shift from an internally focused risk governance model to risk frameworks, also incorporating the wider community.
Enterprise organizations can leverage rich metadata embedded in emails and documents to enable secure and frictionless collaboration between employees working outside the traditional corporate network environments.
Metadata can be used to not only apply visual markings to help people understand the emails and documents they’re handling; it can also inform other components of the security ecosystem – DLPs, CASBs, Firewalls, and other products – how to handle sensitive data.
The “collaborative model” of Titus’ rich and persistent metadata allows organizations to understand and identify not only the data they send but also the data they receive from third parties.
In a recent Dataversity article about Zero Trust, Mark Cassetta showed how modest changes could be used to build trust effectively.
In a world that suddenly found itself plunged in a genuine zero trust model with an ever-present threat from an invisible enemy, relatively simple changes like Perspex screens in stores, contact-less shopping, and people wearing masks, can bring a level of trust back to everyday life.
By using a Titus foundation of data identification, embedded metadata, focused communication capability, and enlightened ecosystems, deploying zero trust solutions that build on risk-aware communities and informed end-users not only become a possibility, but a practical and preferred way to move forward.